John Menick Blog | Archive for ‘Quotes’

From a description of “New Athens,” a future artists’ utopia in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953):

The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest — and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on “total identification.” The history of cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old “moving pictures” more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become — for a while at least — any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be a plant or an animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the “program” was over he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life — indeed, indistinguishable from life itself.

From Lem’s sci-fi detective novel, The Investigation:

The little game has always fascinated Gregory when he was nineteen. He used to stand in the middle of a crowd without knowing until the last minute whether or not he’d board an approaching train, waiting for some kind of internal sign or act of the will to tell him what to do. “No matter what I won’t move from this spot,” he would sometimes swear to himself, then would jump on just as the doors were shutting. Other times he would tell himself severely, “I’ll take the next train,” and instead would find himself entering the one standing right before him. The very concept of chance had fascinated Gregory when he was younger, and through self-analysis and research he had tried to study it s workings in his own personality, though without any results, to be sure.

While completing his first book in New York during the early 1960s, Manuel Puig worked at JFK’s Air France ticket counter. Puig, a well-known and inveterate cinephile, looked up…

…and saw, less than two feet away, the exquisite face of Greta Garbo. Even before he saw her, he heard her, or rather he heard a familiar cavernous contralto voice requesting a ticket to Paris, France. Manuel’s seamless impersonation of Garbo was no doubt enhanced by the visitation; Guillermo Cabrera Infante describes how Manuel’s imitations forever changed the experience of seeing Garbo in dazzling black in white: she became a mere copy of Manuel’s imitation… Minutes later she returned to the counter: “Are you sure this plane is going to Paris, France?” Manuel offered to carry her suitcases… “The woman is tired,” she cried suddenly, handing him a tip and inspiring a lifelong mannerism of referring to himself as “la woman.” Then she disappeared into the bowels of the plane, and “the myth became human, vulnerable and anonymous all at one time, Garbo eclipsed by the masses, the gestures of countless individuals also vanishing in a similar airport, or railway station.”

From Suzanne Jill Levine’s Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman